Halloween After The Apocalypse
by BritishWaffleSyrup
Summary: After the apocalypse, Ellis, Rochelle, and their two kids, go trick-or-treating. Guess who they find? Yup, that's right. Read on, my friends! Warning: May contain my rambling.


**Happy late Halloween! Yeah, I was going to do this on Halloween itself, but I was trick-or-treating (You are NEVER too old) and then I had homework. The next day I was playing video games and then going to art class. Also eating candy. And now it's a school holiday, so I'm typing it now. It's a one shot, so yeah! XD**

_1 year after the apocalypse…_

"Come on Nick, it won't be tha' bad." Ellis said through the phone, which he was holding on his shoulder while balancing a bowl of candy in the other. "Halloween is fun!"

Nick said through the other end, _"You're right. Handing out candy to brats IS fun."_

Ellis grinned, and replied, "Ever the pessimist. I gotta go; I'm goin' trick-or-treatin' with Ro and the kids."

"Who was that?" Rochelle asked, as Ellis snapped the phone shut.

"Nick. Who else?" He said, smiling.

"I thought I heard the voice of negative." Rochelle joked. Ellis laughed.

"Yeah, even when we found the cure and restore the human in the Infected, he talked abou' how he could of found it better, rather than fall down the hole an' land on top of it." He remembered.

Rochelle gasped joyfully. "I remember that! And when he had snagged his suit on a branch and the back was ripped clean off." The couple chuckled at old times. Suddenly, two kids ran out of a hallway from the mansion they had earned as a reward for their bravery. Coach and Nick each had separate ones, Nick in the town neighboring them and Coach's was up in the Rockies, which the other three visited from time to time.

"Dad, do ya know what just happened?" The child said. The child looked more like his dad, but with some of his mom's features. Atop the curly brown hair sat a smaller version of the blue and white hat, and he wore a pair of baggy jeans with a white sleeved, green shirt with a wrench decorated onto it. He had darkish skin, brown, bright eyes, small lips and nose, and round ears. The other child was an older girl, with black hair in a ponytail. She was the opposite of the child standing next to her, looking more like her mom. She smiled, her blue eyes bright with amusement. She also had small lips and nose, but with slightly pointier ears. She wore a blue jacket with a pattern of owls on it, with a silver shirt also featuring an owl in flight. She wore black jeans, and a blue pair of Converse.

"Hello Toby, hey Felicity. What happened?" Rochelle asked, sharing an amused look with her husband before crouching down to face her son.

"Well, we were playin' Halo Reach, right? So ah built a bridge out of a bunch of platforms on Forge, and just as ah put the finishing touches on it, with a tunnel of shield doors above, a vehicle comes whizzing off the end of it-" By this point, Felicity was laughing. "-and smashes into the mountain, explodin'! When ah go ta look at the wreckage, guess who ah see?"

"Me. It was hilarious!" Felicity said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. Toby grinned as well.

"It was pretty sweet. When are we goin' trick-or-treatin?" He asked, changing the subject randomly as he had the habit of doing.

"About an hour from now." Ellis said, ruffling his son's hair.

"Wait until you see what Uncle Nick got you." Rochelle added, and walked off to her and Ellis's room to get the gifts. At the mention of presents from their Uncle, Felicity and Toby's eyes lit up even more than they already were. After a couple of minutes, Rochelle walked back into the large living room carrying two packages wrapped clumsily with ghost covered paper. She handed the gifts to the two children, and before ripping the wrapping paper open, they read the tags.

"To terror number one, happy Halloween. From your favorite uncle and gambler, Nick." Felicity read out loud.

"To terror number two, Happy Halloween as well. You know who it's from." Toby read. Rochelle rolled her eyes, and Ellis snorted.

"Yup, Nick hasn't changed yet." Ellis noted, smiling his lopsided grin. Felicity and Toby tore open the wrapping paper, revealing two costumes.

"Slender man!" Toby yelled delightedly.

"Medusa! Awesome." Felicity laughed.

"You wanna go put them on?" Ellis grinned.

"YES!" The two kids said in unison, and ran off to their bedrooms.

"Wow. Nick actually bothered about something other than his gambling." Rochelle said.

"Or fighting." Ellis added. Ever since the apocalypse, it seemed that the four had gained an interest in some sort of fighting or exercise. They regularly went to the martial arts training center, the YMCA, or the shooting range. The two children ran in with their costumes on. Felicity had snakes coming out of the top of her costume and wore elegant black robes with sandals. Toby's face had been covered by a morph suit, as had his hands. He wore the standard Slender costume; a black jacket, the same colored dress pants and shoes, a white shirt, and a red neck-tie.

"Cool." Ellis chuckled, studying his two kids.

"I agree." Rochelle said, smiling. "Come on. I made dinner a while ago, then after we can go trick-or-treating. Sound good?"

"Yep." The two children and their dad said, making their way towards the table, which sat in a large, yellow room. The table itself had once been a long banquet table, but the family had sold it and replaced it with a small, circular, stained glass table. The empty space had been filled with sculptures, shelves filled with glass ornaments and vases with expensive flowers, and at the end of the hall was a giant fish tank, with many tropical fish swimming about in clear blue water, marble miniature castles, and seaweed. Above the family table was an old-fashioned chandelier, with electric fake candles.

The family dug into their food that the mom had so deliciously prepared.

The dark night air did not matter to the family as they wound their way through the streets with children laughing and running around, hitting as many houses as they could that had their lights on, while the adults chuckled at them, passed out candy to the sound of "Trick or treat!" and took pictures of their own kids.

"Ah, I love Halloween. This one time, your Uncle Keith…" Ellis started telling the story about how Keith had TP'd and egged an old man's house when he hadn't given them candy, and when the cops came, jumped the fence but then ran into the old man's vicious Rottweiler neither Ellis nor Keith knew he had. "…and the cops practically had ta drag the dog off by brute force, but Keith's leg was so messed up, he had ta go ta the hospital." Ellis finished.

"Whoa. Our uncle Keith sounds like an awesome dude. When do we get to meet him?" Felicity asked.

"Well, I've been talkin' to him, and he says he'll be able to come over a couple weeks from now." Ellis said excitedly.

"To tell the truth, I didn't actually believe your dad… Wait. Where is everyone?" Rochelle asked. The group looked around. While they had been talking, the street had been deserted. A fog started seeping low through the place. Two figures started walking towards them through the thick mist. Ellis and Rochelle pulled out the two Glocks they always kept with them, and pointed them with a steady aim at the creatures of the dark. As the figures came closer, the group realized there were a moving bundle on top of one of the figures. The figures came to a stop a few meters away from the family, and the fog cleared away.

"Sorry! We didn't mean to scare you." A woman's voice rang out. As the remnants of the mist cleared, the group saw that the one who had spoken was indeed a woman. However, this woman was different. There was a bandana tied pulling her –hair?- up. She had yellow, snake-like eyes and wore a black, flowing dress like Felicity's. A thin, divided at the end, snake tongue flickered out then disappeared back into the woman's mouth.

"Medusa." Felicity whispered excitedly.

"Yup. Nice dress." The snake woman replied.

The group's heads turned towards the other figure, who had remained silent. The figure had a blank, white face, with a black suit and red neck-tie. Four limbs waved at the back of the man.

"Slender man! No way." Toby muttered happily. Slender man held out his hand that held something in it, and, when Toby looked at his parents who nodded, approached cautiously and peered at the object held out to him.

"Cool." He whispered, taking the wristwatch made of diamonds. "Thanks-" He started to say, but the two figures had disappeared into the air. The sound of laughter soon filled their ears as kids started going from house to house again as if nothing had happened.

"Told you ghosts are real." Ellis said, nudging Rochelle.

"You're welcome." A disembodied voice said that only the four could hear.

**Done! I decided to write partly about Slender man, because EVERYONE talks about him at school and at my bus stop, so I looked him up, and now wrote about him. Also, I wanted to write this because there were no other Halloween stories in the L4D/L4D2 archive. Then again, it is a horror archive about zombies ruining life as we know it and terrorizing the few survivors… Ah well. Happy late Halloween! **


End file.
